Progressive Labor Party on Race & Racism

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class. We organize workers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.

Only the dictatorship of the working class — communism — can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today’s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.

Worldwide capitalism, in its relentless drive for profit, inevitably leads to war, fascism, poverty, disease, starvation and environmental destruction. The capitalist class, through its state power — governments, armies, police, schools and culture — maintains a dictatorship over the world’s workers. The capitalist dictatorship supports, and is supported by, the anti-working-class ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, individualism and religion.

While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim “communism is dead,” capitalism is the real failure for billions worldwide. Capitalism returned to Russia and China because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system, like wages and privileges. Russia and China did not establish communism.

Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. Everyone will share in society’s benefits and burdens.

Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian and indigenous workers, and to divide the entire working class.

Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women — sexism — and divisive gender roles created by the class society.

Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one Party.

Communism means that the minds of millions of workers must become free from religion’s false promises, unscientific thinking and poisonous ideology. Communism will triumph when the masses of workers can use the science of dialectical materialism to understand, analyze and change the world to meet their needs and aspirations.

Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers — eventually everyone — must become communist organizers. Join Us!

The recent G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, highlighted the escalating battle between two packs of U.S. bosses. The main wing U.S. finance capitalists were hit by both the domestic U.S. bosses, fronted by President Donald Trump, and by Russian capitalists led by President Vladimir Putin. In response, the big U.S. imperialists are trying to rally what’s left of their alliance in the European ruling class to counter expansionist moves by Russian and Chinese rulers. The volatile dynamic between these U.S. factions is accelerating a worldwide drive toward fascism. The desperate U.S. main wing (the Big Fascists) sees its empire slipping away. But they won’t give it up without a fight. With the bosses heading toward World War III, Progressive Labor Party calls on the working class to battle for our own class interests. PLP is building an international communist movement to fight for a revolutionary communist society. It’s our only alternative to the bosses’ rising fascism, chaos, and destruction.Putin attacks liberal world orderIn an interview on the first day of the summit, the blood-soaked Putin openly challenged the U.S. main wing. He declared that “the world’s liberal political order had outlived its purpose” (New York Times, 6/28). In attacking the liberal world order led by the U.S. main wing ruling class since World War II, Putin signaled that Europe is up for grabs.Trump, who is backed by the isolationist, domestically oriented wing of U.S. capitalists, joined the Russian president in jokes at the U.S. liberal bosses’ expense (BBC News, 6/28). Trump also staged a sit-down with Mohammed bin Salman, the ruthless crown prince of Saudi Arabia, despite a United Nations report confirming that bin Salman was responsible for the savage killing of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi, a main wing voice at the Washington Post (The Guardian, 6/19). Finance rulers call for war in EuropeIn the face of expanding influence by Russian and Chinese bosses in Europe, the main wing U.S. capitalists are rallying their allies in Europe’s finance capitals. The ruling French and German finance bosses used their tenuous victory in May’s European Parliament elections to install pro-main wing bureaucrats at the head of the European Union.German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, an Angela Merkel protégé who backs a strong European military, was appointed president of the EU’s executive body. Christine Lagarde, chief of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund, was nominated as the next head of the European Central Bank. Though splits inside the bosses’ camp are significant, the finance capitalists are consolidating their power and doing their best to bolster their old NATO alliance. As the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. finance capital’s leading think tank, points out, the stakes are high:

The more internally divided Europe is, the more it will find itself at the mercy of … great powers [Russia and China]. This is a recipe for a Europe once again roiled by nationalism, an EU that is irrelevant, and a transatlantic alliance in which Europe has little influence and the United States lacks a strong partner…The only prudent way to avoid this nightmare scenario is for Europe to … develop the ability to better defend itself … pursue common European interests … [and] do more to secure neighboring regions (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2019).

Big Fascists use climate movement to enlist the working classIn 2017, the isolationist U.S. bosses, who have significant holdings in heavy-polluting domestic fossil fuels, pushed Trump to pull out of the Paris climate agreement negotiated by predecessor Barack Obama, a reliable stooge for the main wing. Now finance capital is back on the offensive. Emmanuel Macron, the French president and former Rothschild investment banker, threatened “not to sign any joint statement from the Group of 20 summit … unless it deals with the [climate] issue, which he called a ‘red line’” (New York Times, 6/26).Liberal environmentalism is on the rise. The Sunrise Movement and its Green New Deal, championed by phony leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was incubated at the Sierra Club (E&E News, 12/3/18), where the agenda is driven by main wing billionaire donors like Michael Bloomberg and finance capital nonprofits like Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (opensecrets.org). From its start, the environmental movement was designed to force smaller domestic capitalists to fall in line. In 1970, the main wing Ford Foundation began funding the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, and the Southern California Center for Law in the Public Interest. “In the ensuing years, [these groups]…advocated …for environmental protection on virtually every public policy issue at the federal, state, and local level” (Duke Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society). Environmentalism is a partisan issue because “any attempt to regulate pollution is an attempt…to regulate the economy” (medium.com 1/26/17)—and because regulations hit the small capitalists much harder than the big ones. But the environmental movement isn’t just about the economy. Back in 2002, after the Sierra Club backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq over phantom “weapons of mass destruction,” the organization threatened to dissolve its southern Utah chapter for “speaking out against the Bush administration’s push toward war” (Huffington Post 5/25/2011). To protect their control over Middle East oil, the finance capitalists were willing to sacrifice the lives of more than a million workers and children in Iraq. Now their targets are the Chinese and Russian rulers, plus the “Fortress America” U.S. bosses who are against committing taxes and treasure to an expensive global conflict. If history is a guide, the environmental movement will help sound the main wing’s battle cry.A fight between monstersThe rulers’ cynicism knows no limits. The misleaders now beating the drum on the environment represent the same profit-mad bosses who built their fortunes by ruining our air, water, and food. They are the same animals who poisoned the children of Flint, Michigan. They are the same monsters who drowned the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to protect their French Quarter investments—and then exploited the tragedy to gentrify other formerly Black working-class neighborhoods.When (and if) they prevail over their capitalist rivals, the main wing will use fascism to attack the working class. It was finance capital that funded Hitler and gave him the poison gas used in the Nazi death camps. It was finance capital that dropped Agent Orange and napalm on the children of Vietnam. It’s not just misguided to trust the liberal bosses. It is suicidal!Are Trump and his Koch brother benefactors a gang of racist murderers? Without a doubt. They are enemies of our class and must be fought to the end. But we cannot allow fear of these Little Fascists to drive us into the deadly embrace of finance capital, into the camp of Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren. The Big Fascists have a long and ugly history of slaughtering masses of workers, all in the name of liberal democracy.Our fight must be for our class. It must be against our oppressors. Most of all, it must be for communism!